


the only hoax i believe in

by princessoftheworlds



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Bad Parenting, Canon Backstory, Canon Compliant, Character(s) of Color, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28246167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessoftheworlds/pseuds/princessoftheworlds
Summary: How Torchwood failed Suzie Costello, Lisa Hallett, and Toshiko Sato and how Torchwood didn't.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	the only hoax i believe in

**Author's Note:**

  * For [someawkwardprose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/someawkwardprose/gifts).



> Happy birthday, CJ! You asked for a Suzie-esqe fic, and I kinda hijacked this prompt with an idea I already had lmao. Either way, I hope you like this!
> 
> Beta'd by Vi and also Annika. Title from Taylor Swift's "Hoax." (Listen to folklore.)
> 
> Hope you enjoy and happy birthday!!!
> 
> (Also, indirectedly inspired by my post about [Torchwood mistreated its characters of color](https://princess-of-the-worlds.tumblr.com/post/631272531355107328/torchwood-and-the-mistreatment-of-its-characters). Because Torchwood really did fail a lot of its characters of color, especially it's WOC, and it's this problematic nature we should acknowledge, even as we continue to enjoy the show, all of this which I say as a queer WOC and a Torchwood fan.)

When Suzanne Costello is born, her mother adores her, and her father is apathetic.

Her parents met at university, her father forced into engineering by his Indian parents, her mother an intended doctor lacking the proper grades. Their enthusiasm for their studies wavered, as later did their passion in their marriage, but she was pregnant soon enough. He turned his focus into shaping himself, his wife, and their unborn daughter into “the perfect family.”

Yet Suzie’s birth causes her mother serious complications, nearly killing her, and she never truly does recover. Weak and mostly bedridden for the rest of her remaining life, she cherishes her only daughter until she dies right after Suzie turns five. Left frequently alone at home, she entertains herself with her father’s old uni textbooks. As she becomes fascinated with mechanical engineering and computers and maths, her father becomes harsher and more verbally abusive, tearing large gashes in young Suzie’s sense of self.

When Suzie Costello is a child, she comes to possess a multitude of contrasts and pretenses that lasts far into her adult life. She has a barbed tongue but keeps it to herself. She presents a kind and thoughtful front, which isn’t entirely false but also covers a brilliant, remarkable mind. Her father’s taunts, however, have turned her disbelieving of any of her own talents.

The biggest act of teenaged Suzie Costello is attending uni to study engineering and computer science. For the first time, as far as she can remember, she is finally, truly  _ happy _ and thriving, but still, she is seen as quiet and meek and is often underestimated as a woman and as a person of color. She has a few short lived sexual flings with both men and women, and she’s always the one to break them off.

By the time rumors of her brilliance grow, Suzie has completed her PhD and is apathetically working for a top-notch London company. The work she does there is cutting-edge, even if it doesn’t feel satisfying. 

When Captain Jack Harkness personally comes to her and tells her he’s got a job for her  _ she won’t believe, _ Suzie says yes.

Torchwood is extraordinary, beyond Suzie’s dreams, thrilling the child within her whose mother showed her the stars. She is able to work on alien electronics and weapons and, within her first week, helps Jack repair a Renault spaceship, sending its passengers back to their home world.

Jack flirts with her afterwards, not that he hasn’t already, but Suzie, dark-eyed and with a dangerous smile, says no.

For the first time in her life, Suzie Costello feels important. There is more to life on Earth. There’s wonders out there in the universe, and she’s seeing them. There’s dangers out there in the universe, and she’s helping keep humanity safe. She’s  _ Torchwood,  _ and she  _ matters. _

The feeling doesn’t last. It never does. There’s only so much that can sustain her when it’s just the two of them - her and Jack just scrambling over Cardiff to foil alien invasions, catch Weevils, and monitor Rift flares. She goes several weeks without seeing her bed, until Jack has to force her to go home, and meals become a lower priority.

Suzie’s curiosity and thirst for knowledge, for  _ more,  _ for  _ beyond Torchwood,  _ only grows by the time Tosh joins them, eighteen months later. Tosh is quiet and meek, and Suzie doesn’t know if that was the UNIT prison or just her personality, but either way, it reminds her of her younger self, and Tosh  _ infuriates  _ her. Their conversations are limited to brief technical exchanges. Suzie rebuffs Tosh’s few friendly invites, and Tosh stops trying. Jack, still running himself ragged, even with his team slowly coming together, is too busy and hurting to even notice that Suzie’s fading. (And by the time he does, it’s too late.)

She never really liked Cardiff, this city she was forced to move to, and everything that comes through the Rift is mainly trash; there’s only so long Torchwood can go around repairing it and chasing Weevils. Essentially the rubbish men of the universe they are, a jaded Suzie decides.

Owen Harper’s introduction to the team revives her, just a bit. Although she’s never felt love, she learned loss at a young age, and she recognizes it in him, along with the grief. His fiery temperament spurs the witty edge inside her, and Suzie falls into bed with him, incurring Tosh’s disapproval. (She’s so desperately in love with Owen, and he won’t give her time of day; Suzie’s only doing Tosh a favor.) 

But it doesn’t last longer than several months before Suzie’s fading again. Then Torchwood finds the Resurrection Glove, right around the time silent butler Ianto Jones joins.

Jack wants Ianto to shelve it in the archives, calls it space junk, but Suzie, who has never been more than Jack’s sarcastic yet loyal second-in-command, who has never asked Jack for anything, asks to study it. She discovers its resurrective properties, bringing it its witty name courtesy of Ianto, but it also discovers  _ her.  _

There’s always been a bit of madness lingering within Suzie - there’s had to be to survive a father like hers. Everything coincides. Suzie’s loneliness, her father’s cancer diagnosis, Jack’s distraction with Ianto. The glove taps into the madness within her, growing a symbiotic relationship, and she gets a taste of its power and needs  _ more. _ And thus, everything begins.

When Suzie Costello begins to experiment on the Resurrection Glove, it corrupts her, and no one is around to see, to save her. She gave herself to Torchwood, but Torchwood didn’t have time for her.

Gwen Cooper is Suzie’s downfall, ushering in a new age of humanity for Torchwood Three. Suzie has been made an afterthought, and when her brilliant plan comes to fruition, it angers her. Torchwood has time for Gwen Cooper, but it didn’t for her, and now she’s taking the life itself from Gwen Cooper. (The parallel was never planned, but she appreciates it.)

When Suzie Costello dies the second time, she is forgotten, dismissed, and betrayed, all at the hands of Torchwood.

* * *

Before Lisa Hallett becomes a Cyberwoman, she is so  _ painfully human. _

She’s born to a middle-class family in London, the middle of three, and her childhood is never found lacking. It is, by all accounts, normal. She plays dolls with her younger sister but sneakingly plays with her brother’s science kit. Her family takes yearly vacations around the United Kingdom - skiing, camping, fishing, hiking.

As Lisa begins going to school, it quickly becomes apparent that she is brighter than anyone expected, including both her teachers and parents. When given the opportunity to apply her smarts, Lisa begins to shine. She’s multi-talented, not necessarily specialized in any particular subject, but she does adore learning and takes on any challenge, no matter how stubborn. 

Three things you need to know about Lisa. 

One, the Halletts are all high-achievers, and Lisa, in comparison, seems to be slightly directionless. Two, Lisa is  _ kind _ , and the door of the shitty London flat she moves into after graduating uni is always open to her friends, of which she has many. Three, she’s also unlucky in love; her openness and wearing of her heart on her sleeve leads to her being dumped by several boyfriends and a sole girlfriend. 

But throughout Lisa’s young life, she never changes, and that’s what leads her to Torchwood One.

Lisa Hallet is twenty-two, graduated from uni with a degree in library science, and is working as a waitress as she applies to jobs when she stumbles across a young woman crying in a dirty alley. She tries to comfort the woman and is surprised to learn that the woman is not human at all and is, in fact, instead a Plasmavore, but before Lisa can have her blood sucked from her veins, she’s saved by Torchwood One. 

Somewhere in all the chaos of being taken back to Canary Wharf, her intended Retconning turns into a job offer, and the next Monday, she starts as the newest junior researcher of the Alien Acquisitions department, under Tommy Pierce.

Of course, she has a formal interview where she’s forced to sign the Official Secrets Acts, and  _ doesn’t that  _ boggle her mind. Aliens! There are aliens in the universe, and one of them tried to kill her. The fear and nightmares don’t actually hit her until several weeks later and never truly fade.

At Torchwood One, Lisa truly thrives, able to use her analytical mind and creativity in a way she feels actually matters. She has friends, a good job she adores, and, seemingly for the first time,  _ direction.  _ Torchwood One is also where Lisa falls in love for the first and last time. 

Two years after she joins, she’s assigned to train a new junior researcher. His name is Ianto Jones, and he’s a quiet Welshman who was personally vouched for by Director Hartman, who looks good in suits but wears them like he’s still growing into them. Needless to say, Lisa’s curious, but quickly, she finds that underneath the polite demeanor is a wit that makes her laugh like nothing else has before. Plus, Ianto makes a mean cup of coffee, and he always makes her one. He’s also bloody  _ adorable,  _ and thus, Lisa’s crush on the Welshman only grows.

Their first date doesn’t go well, and then he’s whipped away to be Director Hartman’s PA. Then he comes back to ask her out again, and this time, they hit the right stride. About a year later, they’ve moved in together and have many well-wishers at Torchwood, including Yvonne. As they near the end of the second year of their relationship, Adeola, Lisa’s friend, begins to whisper mischievously about a proposal.

Here’s the thing. In a few short years, Torchwood entirely becomes Lisa’s life, consuming everything she has outside. She keeps normal hours, as much as one can at Torchwood, but when she can’t tell her parents what she really does for a living, what else can she really tell them at all? Her brother marries, her sister moves away, and her parents eventually move to France for retirement. Then all she really has left in London is Ianto and Torchwood and their friends.

But Torchwood is  _ hungry,  _ and it  _ takes  _ and  _ takes _ and  _ takes. _ Lisa ties herself entirely to the organization, blindly following Yvonne Hartman, only to be led astray.

When Lisa’s screaming her throat hoarse, strapped down to a conversion unit, and the blades begin to descend, and there’s the first blood splatter as her skin is sliced open, the nightmares about the Plasmavore return.

When Ianto finds her and drags her out of the wreckage of Canary Wharf, she is no longer human, no longer entirely  _ Lisa Hallett. _

The last bit of Lisa screams when her beloved Ianto brings her to Cardiff and flirts his way into Torchwood Three, drawing the eye of Captain Jack Harkness and manufacturing Rift alerts to hide her in the Hub.

“I love you, Lisa,” he murmurs to her, stroking his gentle thumb along her jaw, painting her nails silver and brightening up the dank room that has become all she sees with flowers and pictures. “I love you. We just need to find that doctor from Japan, and he will help you. Everything will be alright. I love you.”

_ Let me go, Ianto,  _ she wants to sob.  _ I don’t want any of this. I love you, but let me go, Ianto. Let me die. Please.  _

But he doesn’t. Because Ianto Jones loves her, and Torchwood has its claws in her, in him, in both of them, and won’t let them go now. 

She pretends she doesn’t see him suffering, because nowadays, everything  _ hurts.  _ She pretends that the voice in her head that isn’t  _ hers,  _ that keeps whispering inhumane things to her, is quiet. She pretends the brick and stained walls and pipes of the Hub are the cracked walls of the shitty flat where her friends were always swinging through and laughter was always flowing.

When Torchwood finally lets Lisa Hallett go, it ruthlessly kills her and Jack Harkness and Ianto Jones and Annie Botchwell. 

And the fucked-up part is that Lisa is  _ glad.  _ She’s happy to finally be free.

* * *

Toshiko Sato loves very deeply, very completely, and ultimately, that’s what allows Torchwood to kill her.

She’s born in London, but her earliest childhood memories come from where her family’s moved to Osaka, a few years before her younger brother is born. Her parents both work for the RAF, albeit in an international capacity now, always away during the day, so Tosh is watched by her grandmother, who tells her Japanese fairy tales and myths, instilling a young Tosh with a sense of romanticism.

This is when Tosh begins to develop her desire to love and to  _ be  _ loved.

Evenings are time for her parents to return home and tell their growing children about their work, allowing Tosh to bombard her father with curious questions about his engineering work and to coax her mother into showing her computer programs.

In 1986, the Satos return to London, after Tosh’s grandmother dies and she experiences the first real loss and heartbreak of her young life. Alienated by her new classmates and the unfamiliar culture, Tosh grows closer to her mother. At school, Tosh’s brilliance only brightens. Her teachers take notice and push for her to be in advanced classes, but even that isn’t enough to quench her thirst for knowledge, so she borrows university textbooks from the local library and devours them at night.

Tosh breezes through uni and graduate school and graduates several years early. At age twenty-three, she’s snatched up by the Ministry of Defence and settled down at the Lodmoor Research Facility.

Her unconditional love for her parents - and her lack of any true socialization - brings Tosh to the attention of a terrorist group. She’s unfairly imprisoned for life in a UNIT prison after unintentionally - but rather  _ brilliantly  _ \- creating a sonic modulator. 

And thus enters Captain Jack Harkness into her life, a man Tosh will come to love as a brother, but with him - Torchwood.

It’s not a very hard sell for Tosh - five years of servitude for Torchwood or a life in prison. Yet she doesn’t expect to love it.

Torchwood opens up Tosh’s eyes to  _ the world.  _ As a rationalist and a scientist, she’s always considered that there could be life out there in the universe but never really gives much weight to the idea considering the lack of concrete proof. Torchwood changes that. Here is the proof, right in front of Tosh’s eyes like it’s always been and she’s just never seen it.

On Tosh’s first day, her first proper day, where she’s introduced to Suzie and set down with an actual desk and computer, she revamps the entire Mainframe, and Jack compliments her so gushingly that she blushes. She’s known men like Jack before; he flirts, but he doesn’t really mean it, not unless she actually asks, and Tosh decides that she’s never going to ask.

Several months later is the first time she meets Tommy, and the romantic in her finds his tale tragic. She just didn’t expect him to be so shy yet so  _ charming.  _ It feels like, despite the fact that he was born in 1894, he’s someone she could have known her entire life.

The first time he goes back to sleep is hard, and she returns home late at night and ends up sobbing into the pillows of her bed. The second time is no easier, but the third time, with her growing feelings for Tommy, this remarkable, brave man she’s met really only for two days, she is prepared.

But Tosh isn’t prepared for Owen Harper. 

Her first observation about him is that he’s an angry, brilliant,  _ broken  _ man. Jack never really says whom he’s grieving, nor does Owen ever let it slip, but Tosh doesn’t need to know. Early on in his tenure of Torchwood, Owen ends up waist-deep in alien guts, operating on a pregnant Unam in the middle of battle, and his brown eyes hold a spark of furious determination and passion. That is all Tosh needs to fall in love.

As with all Tosh has loved from afar, Owen never notices, not until it’s too late. At this point, the team is still in fragments. Jack does his best to lead, and Suzie mostly follows unless she’s doing her own thing, which as time proceeds, she almost always is. Owen argues but listens when it counts, but there’s a disconnect when it comes to all four of them working together. This crack tightens when Ianto joins but is sealed by Gwen slipping them all into place like glue, Suzie dying.

Tosh and Suzie never really got along, so when Gwen joins, Tosh is delighted to have another woman on the team. Gwen is sweet, wide-eyed with an innocence Tosh misses, well-intentioned at heart, but unfortunately for both of them, she becomes involved with Owen.

Nursing her tendered heart, Tosh is left vulnerable to Mary, for whom she falls hard and fast. She’s never felt this kind of love before - strong and passionate and  _ this intense. _ Briefly, she imagines if this is what Owen feels like all the time before she stops thinking of Owen at all.

Mary, who'd already been known to be morally dubious, turns out to be snake-faced, yet her loss, at the hands of Jack, at the hands of  _ Torchwood,  _ still  _ hurts.  _ Then after seeing Owen with Diane and growing closer with the team when Jack leaves, Torchwood takes Tommy too, to a death he did not deserve to die.

The final straw is Owen. He dies and comes back, but it is not the same. He is not the same, and while Tosh is screaming in her head that she does not care, that she loves him anyways, he cannot stand it.

So there it is. Tosh attempts to give her heart to the world but gives it to Torchwood instead, giving it to death. Eventually, it takes  _ her  _ too, as if she had not paid enough of a price yet.

When she’s choking on her own blood, dying on the cold cement floor of the Hub, cradled by Jack and watched by a teary-eyed Ianto and Gwen, she wants to tell them not to worry, that it was not any of their faults. 

Because it’s true. Because like Toshiko, all of them have followed the pied piper of Torchwood and have been conscripted to death. Because Torchwood  _ takes _ and  _ takes  _ and  _ takes,  _ and it took Suzie, it took Lisa, and it took Tosh.

* * *

But none of the three women would have been who they were without Torchwood.

Torchwood gave Suzie Costello purpose. Jack Harkness showed her the secrets of the universe, and they called out to her. She helped lost and injured aliens and saved their lives alongside innumerable human ones. 

She was the first team member under Jack’s wing, and he carries the memory of her, of how he failed her, to teach him to help even those who seemingly don’t need it. Even thousands of years later, his memory fading, he will think back to that dark-eyed second-in-command that he had personally picked and trusted. She will be a siren song, a story of what happens when he notices too little and too late. 

Suzie was sharp, cunning, and resourceful and she just needed Torchwood to help her see it. Torchwood brought back to life the child within her, the one who had faded after her mother died and all she had left was her father. 

Torchwood gave her  _ power,  _ gave her  _ knowledge  _ beyond her wildest dreams, enough to enamour her. And she loved it.

Lisa Hallett was given direction as well, but more than that, Torchwood gave her a love she could not have even imagined. She loved Ianto Jones with every single bone in her body, and when that wasn’t enough for the universe, with every single atom of her soul.

Her love for Ianto didn’t define her, but it did exemplify her and her large heart that she wore on her sleeve. 

One moment of intended kindness nearly cost her her life and led her to Torchwood, but it also made her loved. She was adored by her co-workers at Torchwood; she was the one who would always remember birthdays and pass around cards or would organize maternity parties or Secret Santas among her and Ianto’s friends. She received genuine compliments from even Yvonne for her kindness.

She was a remarkable woman, well-loved by Ianto, and had she met Jack Harkness, he would have loved her too, because the kind of woman Torchwood shaped Lisa into was loved by everyone who met her. 

Lisa had Torchwood, had Ianto, and she was happy.

Then there’s Toshiko Sato. The brilliant, gorgeous Tosh, one of the most remarkable people Jack Harkness has ever had the pleasure of meeting. She’s emblazoned on his heart, and thus, he carries Torchwood forward in the legacy of women like her and Lisa and Suzie.

At her funeral, a ceremony really, as her body could not be given back to her family, no matter how much Jack wished he could, Ianto, the ever-so-stoic man, had a face shiny with tears. Gwen was inconsolable, held by Rhys as she sobbed into his chest. And Jack? Jack could barely manage eye contact with her mother, his eyes oceans of sorrow.

But this is about Tosh, and if she’d seen her family like that, broken and weeping, she would have wept alongside them. It would have hurt her to see any of them in pain; she had loved them all, deeply, unconditionally, because that’s just who she’d been. 

Torchwood gave Tosh a family, one she unconditionally loved, one she died for. And one for whom she would have done it all again.

So, yes, while Torchwood failed Suzie Costello, Lisa Hallett, and Toshiko Sato, it also saved all of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr [here](http://princess-of-the-worlds.tumblr.com/) or on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/rajkumarinik). I tweet and reblog mostly Torchwood with occasionally amusing commentary on nonsense. Please come talk to me and tell me if/how much you like my fic or like ask me about it on tumblr; all my schoolwork has become remote now, and I have limited social interaction.
> 
> Also, follow CJ [here](http://someawkwardprose.tumblr.com/).


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